Schools, Science and Education

As people grow up, they gain knowledge of their surroundings. For example, if a child goes outside on a cold day, they will no doubt feel the sensation of cold all around them. However, when they touch something metal, it will feel more cold than something which is not metal. The child could quite reasonably conclude that metal is therefore naturally, or essentially, cold.

On an evolutionary scale, it does not matter whether or not this conclusion is correct. All that would matter is whether or not the conclusion is useful in terms of survival. The mind has evolved to generate beliefs which are evolutionarily beneficial.

In a previous post, I summarised David Geary’s theory of Educational Evolutionary Psychology. The fundamental principle is that our brains have evolved to easily acquire some knowledge, like verbal language, but not to acquire other knowledge, like written language. The former is called primary knowledge and the latter is called secondary knowledge.

John Sweller described this theory as a “rare advance” in the study of cognition. I personally have found it to be incredibly interesting and have been trying to think about scientific misconceptions in its light. Unfortunately, I could not find much, in fact anything, by way of reference to it in academic sources dealing with misconceptions.

Conceptual change

The phrase “conceptual change” is used to describe the process by which a person moves from their misconception (or their folk knowledge) to the correct conception. So when a student enters my lab believing that metals are naturally cold and leaves believing that metals are good conductors of heat and not naturally any particular temperature, they have achieved conceptual change.

The problem is how to get from A to B. All the literature I saw acknowledged that this is incredibly tricky. The dominant approach seems to be to cause cognitive conflict (CC). This is ideally where a student’s conceptions are first elicited and brought to the surface. Contradictory evidence, in the form of data, a practical or anecdote, is then presented. This contradiction causes cognitive conflict, a form of dissonance whereby the student is torn between two conceptions. Given the right evidence, the new material is accepted into the student’s cognitive architecture (their schemas) and the old, folk, conception is discarded. This philosophy is based in Piagetian constructivism.

I don’t particularly want to get bogged down in the arguments for and against constructivism as a whole. I’m more interested in what works: does this approach secure better understanding of correct conceptions?

A lack of evidence

Before I started reading into this area, it seemed to me to be obvious that this approach would not be effective. This wasn’t based on my own classroom experience, but a basic idea of the history of science. Whatever particular philosophy of science a person adopts, it’s fairly clear that throughout history theoretical conceptions of the world have been held to despite masses of evidence. I wrote about one particularly illustrative – and fatal! – example here, but the scientific revolution is replete with old theories being overturned only once the weight of contradicting evidence became overwhelming. Until then, scientists just found a way to incorporate the new evidence into old theories (as well as my example and many hundreds of others, the use of epicycles to explain planetary retrograde motion is a case in point). So I felt that the burden of evidence would certainly be on the positive hypothesis that “cognitive conflict is an effective way to achieve conceptual change.”

When I first started reading into this, I expected to be drowned in a sea of high quality, robust studies with quantitative findings. Presumably it isn’t that difficult to set up an RCT looking at different instructional techniques. Unfortunately I could only actually find a couple. I saw a lot of references to other, older studies that I couldn’t always find or didn’t really meet my expectations. There are a lot of studies without control groups, with multiple confounding variables and with qualitative analysis based on conversations with students.

Limon (2001) brings a lot of evidence that CC has been shown not to work. A number of experiments are then referenced which showed positive results but again, a number of these studies have no control group to compare CC against. The paper concludes that CC is a good route, but no fewer than fifteen variables need to be considered and optimised.

In fact I only found a couple of sources that actually conducted an RCT comparing cognitive conflict to a more explicit instructional technique. One of them (Potvin, 2015) compared three theoretical models for conceptual change; two focused on CC and one a “traditional” method of teaching which focussed on repetition. The results showed that one of the CC models is superior, but its effect sizes, despite being significant, are weak. Furthermore the experimental method used was to subject participants to videos, with the “traditional” approach having the same video twice. I’m not sure how well this maps at all onto classroom practice.

Another study (Zohar, 2003) found that cognitive conflict was more effective for high ability students but less effective for lower ability students. The authors argue that this confounding variable can explain inconsistencies in other research. Difficult to extrapolate much more from that.

There might be more stuff out there, but I didn’t find it.

Overkill?

Duit (2009) has a bank of 8400 articles and books on the topic of misconceptions and conceptual change. 8400 of them. 8400. That’s a lot of articles. I had a quick look but the sheer volume was overwhelming. Paying weak deference to the gods of thoroughness I searched the document for “randomised” or for “RCT” and found no references in the titles. The same happened for “explicit.” When I searched “Direct Instruction” there were two contenders; one dealing with DI vs. discovery learning, and the other (Hänze, 2007), for which I could only access the abstract, didn’t show much of a difference between DI and a “cooperative” model of learning. So no luck there either.

Suppressed or overwritten?

Nick Rose directed me to a paper (Shtulman, 2012) whose authors designed an experiment to figure out if, even in adults with a good grounding in science, original misconceptions are ever actually totally erased from memory, or if they are just suppressed. The paper is fascinating and worth a read but essentially concludes that our misconceptions are never erased. We carry them with us always, despite having formal knowledge which directly contradicts them. So I might be able to tell you that “air is indeed made of matter” but deep down my original conception that “air is not made of anything” still exists. That conception has been suppressed over many years, but it is still there. Perhaps over time, if I ceased to think and to teach about such things, it would come once again to be dominant.

The Veritasium videos are great at this. In them, the presenter will often ask questions of the public and then discuss their misconceptions with them. Presumably these people have been educated and, at one point, knew what the true conception was. Yet, over time, their original misconceptions return.

This smacks a big old hole in the constructivist approach and still just leaves us with the same challenge as before: what is the best way to tackle student misconceptions?

Primary and Secondary Misconceptions

Some of the literature vaguely flirts with the difference between misconceptions that people naturally acquire and ones that they acquire after learning something about the world. For example, the false conception that “heavy things fall faster than light things” would be one which people acquire naturally as part of their folk physics. It makes sense; when something heavy falls on you it hurts more than something light. This must be because it moves faster. I would term this a primary misconception. However, the misconception “when a substance is heated it expands because the particles expand” cannot be primary because no one naturally comes to the idea that substances are made of particles! I would therefore term this a secondary misconception.

I don’t know of any research on this but one could hypothesise that secondary misconceptions would be easier to overwrite/suppress than primary ones. Primary ones would be, well, primary; more embedded in our foundational cognitive architecture. However, the fact that none of the literature I saw notices a stark difference between misconceptions leads me to question that hypothesis (I know I know absence of evidence etc.).

Based on Geary himself I think that there is another good reason to doubt that secondary misconceptions would be easier to tackle. He argues that when we acquire secondary knowledge it is through our primary pathways; a process which he calls co-optation. As I mentioned in my summary, primary knowledge leads to secondary knowledge.

So taking the example above, why would someone think that the particles increase in size rather than think that the gaps between them increase in size? No doubt part of it is because our diagrams tend to deemphasise the space between particles, but I think there’s a better reason than that.

Driver notes that a common misconception on the origin of life is preformationism. In essence this assumes that organisms have grown from miniature versions of themselves. In a sense, we all started as tiny humans in our mothers’ wombs and, over time, our parts have grown in proportion to make us bigger humans. Vox’s scholarly article shows how depictions of children in Renaissance art often has them in the same proportions as adults which makes them look like tiny scary old men. It makes sense to assume that when things grow they grow in proportion and to not realise that babies’ heads are actually out of proportion with the rest of their bodies and that when they grow their parts grow at different rates.

If this bit of folk biology is true, then it makes sense to co-opt that theory when learning about how things expand when heated. The whole thing grows in size together, in proportion, just like expanding an image in word or powerpoint.

The same is presumably true of other secondary misconceptions. Take for example the widespread misconception that humans are descended from monkeys as opposed to sharing a common, sea dwelling ancestor. Folk biology tells us that children look like their parents, so it makes sense that we descend from animals which look like us. The secondary knowledge that we acquire in error is based on other areas of our primary knowledge.

If my hypothesis here is true, then, in terms of tackling misconceptions, there would be no difference between primary and secondary. This is a testable hypothesis and, whilst trying to avoid being that guy, I think we need more, and better, research here.

So where does this leave us?

Unfortunately, nowhere. I started with the question what is the best way to tackle student misconceptions and I don’t feel like I have a good, research based answer. The problem is that we already have over 8,000 articles on the topic. Are we any closer to the truth? Doesn’t look like it to me.

List of Things I read (I know not properly referenced and I don’t really care):

Note 1: my computer crashed with all my tabs about halfway through (no search history due to school account) so there are a few things which should be here but aren’t

Note 2: a lot of the stuff I read I only got through the Chartered College

Note 3: this was a really long post. If you made it this far, sorry about that.

Note 4: there are some people out there who know shedloads more about this than I do. This was the dipping of toes into water.

26 thoughts on “We Need To Talk About Misconceptions”

I wonder if part of the difficulty of finding good, consistent teaching advice from research is the size of the teaching question. There’s obviously a sweet spot for asking research questions about teaching. “How should I teach math?” is too large a question to be useful. “How should I respond to Charlie’s question” too small.

“How should I address scientific misconceptions” might be too large. Maybe we’d do better comparing teaching approaches that are more closely connected to specific content. In other words, it might be useful to ask what the most effective way of helping students with a specific Newtonian misconception, or the “seasons are because the Sun is farther away” thing.

A quick kvetch (which I also kvetched on Greg’s blog): the DiSessa Misconceptions Reconceived paper is a constructivist critique of cognitive conflict. Piaget certainly is strongly associated with cognitive conflict, but I don’t know if it’s correct to call cognitive conflict the constructivist approach, considering the strong constructivist critique of it. (The DiSessa piece is also a pretty influential piece, even among experimentalists I’ve read.)

Constructivism (as a model of learning) also gives good theoretical explanation for a lot of the experimental results that you mentioned above. People never lose their misconceptions, truly, because you don’t lose knowledge. Knowledge is developed from knowledge. We can’t delete misconceptions, we can only build stronger cognitive models. When those models are easy for us to use, we use them instead of our faulty models.

The limitations of cognitive conflict for battling misconceptions is that it’s only rarely about battling misconceptions. Most of the time, we need to build knowledge, not delete it (which, as you note, we might never be able to do).

I think this is a good case where, in the absence of clear experimental guidance, we can still connect the dots in a way that leaves us with some ideas about how to approach student misconceptions. Specifically: don’t center on them. Focus on the alternate conceptions, the ones that are true, because that’s what kids are actually missing.

Brilliant comment. Lots to think about. I know the CC/constructivist thing is complicated. Most of the research I saw does tend to conflate them. Ross and Lakin is the best example because of how explicit they are in linking the two.

If I remember rightly CASE aimed to move ahead students’ thinking by inducing CC. So you could regard the EEF RCT of Let’s Think Secondary Science as a test of CC. Unfortunately the results were far from stellar

Constructivist techniques are what work. Simulations, active learning, dialog that brings out and contrasts different conceptions.
You missed the veritasium video that showed one strategy that works and why Khan academy videos may not. You missed the handbook on conceptual change that summarizes 40 years of research on this area.
A confrontational strategy, like you found, is not that effective, like direct instruction. See research by Brna.

Hi Adam. First of all, can I just thank you for writing such a thorough, thought-provoking post. I have a list of links to source and read now, and for that alone, I owe you massive thanks.
I have also been struggling with the idea of supression vs true “understanding”.
When I started to look at Threshold Concepts, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what a concept was. It’s something you understand, rather than just learn, right?
I think you were one of the first people that gave me pause for thought over this. What *is* the difference between a “concept” and a “fact”?
I also assumed, when I read about threshold concepts that once students had broken through their “portal of understanding” there would be no going back. If they understand it, they understand it, right?
But I’m not sure. Firstly, we’re talking about abstract ideas very often, so how can students really understand? They just have to accept a model, really.
Secondly, there does seem to be a need for review (and retrieval) in the same way I have started to see the benefit for things I originally throught of as “just facts”.
I am nowhere near getting to the bottom of this, even if I just treat it as a philosophical point to ponder! I’m going to write about it in more detail, soon. I thought I was ready to write about it now. But then you gave me a whole new reading list to follow up beforehand, so thanks for that! 😉
Absolutely love the deep thinking approach to teaching, whatever the questions and answers raised…

Hia – great comment and feedback as ever. You’re right – I don’t really see the difference between concepts and facts. They are all facts, we can choose to label some as conceptual (i.e. superposition) and some as more grounded (Hastings was in 1066) but ultimately it’s just information. I think of understanding as a measure of to what extent the fact is related to other facts, so if a person knows what a date is, knows how we mark dates, knows what a battle is, knows what hastings is, then they understand the statement better than someone who does not.

The problem with misconceptions is that the other facts which we relate the new ones to tend to flatly contradict each other. That’s why our lives are so difficult and frustrating, and it’s why we don’t have a clear approach for dealing with them yet!

That was very interesting Ben thanks. I wonder, again in that piece, as to why there is no reference to Geary. The article could also be summed up as: our beliefs are dictated by that which is useful, not that which is true. Anyway thanks for the article and if you have any feedback on what I wrote I would be deeply appreciative.

Hi Adam,
Just to extend our twitter chats with a few thoughts on conceptual change research:

I see conceptual change research as a huge body of research which catalogues the issues that pupils have in learning specific aspects of science, and the activities and approaches that teachers/researchers have used to address these issues.

Cognitive conflict is a theoretical heuristic which some researchers in the field have used to describe points at which pupils’ ideas are challenged. It essentially comes from Piaget, but in science education there are many different views of what concepts are and how they change. Parking that for a while though, I wanted to point out that cognitive conflict can never be a general approach, because the way that a teacher/researcher tries to address an issue will depend on the issue that occurs. John-Paul Riordan (@JPScience) and I are currently studying 3 lessons on chromatography that we observed, videod and then got the teacher and pupils to describe as they watched the lessons back (and we videoed those descriptions too!). One of the things that emerges is that some pupils think that darker colours will travel further up the chromatography paper than light ones. Some instead think it is to do with the colours of the rainbow. The teacher picks this up in the answers pupils give on mini-whiteboards and in open discussion (which he is very skilled at). He does several things to address this though: he tells them they are mistaken and that chemical structure doesn’t relate directly to colour; he asks them to try and explain why this would be the case at the molecular/particle level (to show that they cannot); he asks questions about the differences between different inks; he asks them to do further research for homework. All of these might be seen as approaches to create cognitive conflict, if we want to frame it that way.

My point though is that this is all very specific to the issues that the pupils displayed. If a pupil thinks that a heavier object falls faster than a lighter one, then a teacher might demonstrate a coin and feather falling in a vacuum tube. If a pupil thinks that light comes from your eyes to make you see, a teacher might discuss how we need light to see, where light comes from, and/or use a ray diagram to explain. John Paul’s research is fascinating here, because he has explored what experienced science teachers actually do, and they each do a huge range of different things, even when faced with similar issues in pupil learning. He talks about the strategies they use, and draws on military metaphor. I frame all this in a view of complexity in classrooms, and how each classroom is actually unique, despite repeated patterns. So to me, there can be no general approach to conceptual change, that could be tested to give a clear answer. Conceptual change is about the messiness of pupils thinking and interactions with materials, each other, and the environment.

What conceptual change literature is good for then, is opening teachers’ eyes to some of the difficulties that pupils have, and the field also tries to discern what might be causing these, and some ways to address them (but again, domain/issue specific ways). You have suggested a difference between misconceptions coming from everyday experiences, and those coming from the abstract ideas introduced in school; there are loads of different ways to classify different misconceptions but the categories always overlap (e.g. a plant grows using just food from the ground, or we live on a flat surface inside a dome, what Vosniadou calls ‘synthetic models’ which combine experience and learning). There is also a lot of debate around whether some concepts are innate (Susan Carey is a key figure in this)
I have been working for a few years now on a project to summarise research around misconceptions in areas of physics http://www.iop.org/education/teacher/support/piper/page_62597.html , it has taken a long time to convince people that we can’t offer simple solutions for teachers. Instead, by summarising some of this body of research (and linking it to the forthcoming IOP teachers website) we can simply prompt teachers to consider some of the issues pupils face in specific domains of physics. That’s what I think the literature is good for.

I mentioned that ‘concepts’ are defined in lots of different ways (DiSessa, 2006 and Ozdemir & Clark, 2007 give good summaries). It is interesting that you draw on philosophy of science Adam, as this is what happened a lot in the literature: the way scientific theories change was seen as analogous to how children’s theories change. This is for me where conceptual change research has an issue. It tries to define concepts and how they change, but actually this abstract layer of ‘images in the head which are manipulated’ is a hangover from cognitivist psychology in the mid twentieth-century. I am not saying that we don’t have thoughts or mental images, but that these are not the primary site of learning: they emerge from adapting brain structure. I am trying to argue in my work that the abstraction to a supernatural level of concepts doesn’t stand up to philosophical developments in the latter part of the 20th century (e.g. structuralism, complexity theory, neo-materialism), nor to contemporary neuroscience. I think we should reframe conceptual change so that it pays more attention to the details of the ways in which pupils learn (e.g. the specific models they use, the influence of social gestures, the influence of the weather outside!), so that neuroscience can sit alongside detailed exploration of what pupils respond to in classrooms. This is never going to make conceptual change into a simple approach though, to my mind [sic] it will always be about the messiness and richness of classrooms. Like all research, conceptual change research should serve to inspire teachers in recognising and dealing with that messiness, not prescribe how they do so.

Thanks for this mark – really appreciated. You’ve given me a lot to think about but my basic feeling is that we don’t hugely disagree in that you’ve basically presented a pragmatic position that focusses on what teachers do in the classroom.

Some fascinating comments Mark. I’m particularly interested in your descriptions of using SRI techniques – I’m thinking of utilising a similar technique in my PhD research. Have you published a paper yet on this?

Treating the path of conceptual change as analogous to change in scientific theories over time has always struck me as problematic and slightly odd.

Why has it struck you as odd Liz? Someone else said this to me too but couldn’t pin down why. How is it not the same process? You need to convince someone of something, you present the evidence and either they are convinced or they aren’t. Same process for my students as for Galileo!

Hi Mark. I’ve only just got round to fully digesting what you have written here- I’ve been away for a few weeks and on a hiatus from blog-related matters!

As I wrote in my other comment, I really like that essentially we have a professional academic for once not telling teachers that you must do x,y or z, but that we have seen x,y and z work, and it is down to the teacher as a professional to choose and adapt to their class and the students in front of them.

To an extent it is always going to be like this across the board. Teachers must be adaptive and they must be able to respond to whatever their class throws at them. However there is a tension between that and the drive/desire to isolate that which it is which is proving effective. Essentially I like to play the odds, and what I want to know is which of x,y or z is most likely to work most of the time. For example I could observe a teacher doing a whole class enquiry based practical on conservation of mass using sugar and water, ice melting, precipitation reactions etc. Indeed this is the way I used to do it. I could then have a conversation with the students to try and gauge their understanding of conservation of mass. But my problem would be looking back. Let’s say one student understood it well. Is it because of the practical or because as I was circulating I was talking to each of the students about what they were doing? Is it because of the whole class discussion afterwards? Is it because of the way I had structured the worksheets?

One could, pragmatically, argue that we don’t really know and part of “rich” classrooms is making sure that all of these things are happening. But there is also a real cost. What if running a whole class practical in this case is actually an expensive waste of time and could have been achieved as a demo? What if no demo was required? If it were the conversations taking place, what if I didn’t reach every student?

These are important questions and I feel frustrated that my black and white mind feels no closer to a concrete solution!

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